


The Christian Foundations of Healthy Spirituality: A Worksheet for Men

by canary



Category: Men's Hockey RPF
Genre: Coming Out, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, but it's Kevin Hayes so don't expect this to be Real Deep, does anyone remember how Kevin was a Jet, personally I don't like to think about it, so here's an entire fic based around it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-04
Updated: 2020-05-04
Packaged: 2021-02-26 17:38:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23635168
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/canary/pseuds/canary
Summary: Nobody expects Wednesday night chapel at Mark Scheifele’s to spark their gay awakening.(Alternatively: Kevin Hayes gets a clue; gets the hell out of Winnipeg; and gets his man.)
Relationships: Carter Hart/Kevin Hayes, Kevin Hayes/Johnny Gaudreau (but not really), Travis Konecny/Nolan Patrick
Comments: 165
Kudos: 724
Collections: Flyers Fic Exchange 2020





	The Christian Foundations of Healthy Spirituality: A Worksheet for Men

**Author's Note:**

  * For [manybumblebees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/manybumblebees/gifts).

> What can I even say to [manybumblebees](https://archiveofourown.org/users/manybumblebees/pseuds/manybumblebees)? I would not be where I am right now vis-à-vis fandom & writing without your friendship, generosity of spirit, and willingness to let absurdly long AUs hijack your weekends. I am so glad that the universe offered me the opportunity to write this for you, bud.
> 
> In other words, here is 19,080 words of writing about ferda, as an expression of ferda.
> 
> Three thousand thank yous to [makeit_takeit](https://archiveofourown.org/users/makeit_takeit/pseuds/makeit_takeit) 1) for the beta, and 2) without whom I would not know one single fucking thing about Mark Scheifele.
> 
> Content notes: recreational drinking; reference to a past MMF threesome; ill-advised non-graphic sex with a woman; a hockey bro who is socialized as a hockey bro sounding like a hockey bro; and one (1) instance of slander against Wawa.
> 
> Mild handwave for the schedule and New York City geography.

There were a lot of reasons Kevin didn’t like Winnipeg.

First of all: why the fuck did it exist.

Second: why would anyone make the active choice to live there, if not actively forced to by getting rented out by your old boss to the damned Jets.

Because thirdly, it was a boring as fuck, and the Jets didn’t even have the decency to go deep enough into the playoffs to make literally any part of being there worthwhile.

The fourth reason tied into the third reason. It _was_, actually, _boring as fuck_, and all Kevin had to do was go to practice and fuck around on his phone and sit on his couch and stare at the walls. So he had a lot of time to like, _think_, which was kind of a major bummer, because the only things he was thinking about were: how he missed his family, and he was missing his niece’s birthday party. Missing Dorchester, missing Boston, missing New York and living around the corner from Justin Timberlake and Beyoncé because that had been dope as shit. If there was like, one single celebrity in the province of wherever the fuck Winnipeg was—was it in Manitoba? Saskatchewan? Kevin’s knowledge of Canadian geography fuzzed out in the middle bits—but it was almost definitely in Manitoba—anyway, it was a long way away from anywhere Jay-Z had ever been.

He missed his buddies, too, obviously. Five years: they’d basically been family, and one of the few things Kevin did know about Winnipeg was that it was still somehow thirteen full hours of driving away from Johnny in Calgary. He’d like, checked. Like, it was only a two hour flight, but it somehow seemed a little—extra to get on a _plane_ to go hang out in fucking _Calgary_, which as far as he knew was just as bad as Winnipeg only it had 1) Johnny and 2) that whole Stampede thing. Kevin was scared of horses so he was not really into the like, rodeo scene, no matter how dope Johnny claimed it was.

But anyway. He missed his buddies, even Johnny’s stupid Yeezys. Kevin was a shoe guy and Yeezys just weren’t it, so that was how he knew it was bad.

Everyone in the Peg knew he was there as a playoff rental, and it wasn’t that the guys weren’t nice enough—they invited him to shit when he first got there, joked around at practice, but then it all kind of dried up and he was mostly just—chilling.

On his own.

For the first time in his entire life.

In fucking _Winnipeg_.

-

Kevin had never been like, big on the self-reflection or whatever. He knew who he was, or he thought he did: Kevin Patrick Hayes from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Go Pats, go BC Eagles, go Rangers. He loved his family and he loved his boys and he had always figured that the rest of it would kind of—work itself out, like one day he’d finally meet the right girl, the one who was going to make him feel all the things all his dumbass buddies always talked about. Because that was like, the one thing Kevin had never really like, _gotten_—like why was dating a girl supposed to be so great? And like, sex, yeah, it was nice, but sometimes he thought that every guy he knew—even goddamned baby-faced pocket-rocket Johnny Hockey—was a champion bullshitter because like. It was _fine_, it was definitely fine, it was probably on the whole better to be having sex than to not be having sex, but it just wasn’t something that he had ever thought was worth having some high-maintenance blonde putting her shit all over his bathroom and having opinions about how much time he spent with his buddies.

But one day—it was like a fucking Wednesday night, just one of those days with literally not a single fucking thing to distinguish it from every other fucking Wednesday in Winnipeg history—he was actually bored enough to drag his ass over to Mark Scheifele’s for chapel. Kevin considered himself a Christmas-and-maybe-Easter-if-the-schedule-worked-out Catholic, and he hadn’t touched a Bible since his confirmation class. The guys said Scheif always got nice beer, though, even if he didn’t drink during the season, and he got really good food delivered; and, again, Kevin was in _fucking Winnipeg_ so chapel at Scheif’s was apparently the best thing a Wednesday had to offer.

Off to Scheif’s giant dumbass house in the suburbs he went. It was like, fine. He drank a beer in the kitchen with Lowry, joked around with Wheels, figured he’d dust off his bullshitting-about-Jesus skills from confirmation and call it a day.

But like, no. Scheif was one of those Protestants who was _really into it_.

And the like, _theme_ he had prepared for chapel—he had _notes_, he had _printed copies of a worksheet_—was about like. Healthy sexuality in a spiritual context.

The priest who led his confirmation class had certainly not wanted to hear anybody’s thoughts about sex, other than their agreement that they would not be having it until they were married—advice Kevin had already been actively ignoring by that point—so this was fully outside of Kevin’s bullshitting-about-Jesus wheelhouse.

And it turned out these Winnipeg fuckers took this shit _serious_.

Like.

Kevin didn’t want to accuse Mika or Kreids of not caring about him as a person. But both of them would have limited their opinion on Kevin’s sex life to a fist bump and a _yeah bro_.

Mark Scheifele was asking him to _write down—_like with a fucking pencil, in his hand—the best sex he’d ever had, and was asking him to think about the things that had made it _special_. Was guiding guys towards thinking about like, trust, and honesty, and respect for their partners, and open communication and that shit, and these dudes were like. Nodding along and _engaging_.

Kevin—yeah. Kevin had had girlfriends. The sex had been—fine. The girlfriends had been—fine. Kevin’s mom had liked them. That had counted for something.

But like. Sitting on this beige-ass couch in boring-ass Winnipeg with, apparently, God as his witness: Kevin could not deny that the hottest sex he’d ever had was with Johnny Gaudreau and some girl they’d picked up one night at Buff’s in Newton. It had not been hot because of any of the things Mark Scheifele of the Winnipeg Jets was saying.

Well. Okay. He did trust Johnny, and he did respect Johnny, and he wouldn’t say that he _didn’t_ respect that girl—what the fuck had her name been? Megan? Jessica?—but like. The thing that had made that the hottest sex of his life, Kevin was realizing, in Mark Scheifele’s giant professionally-decorated all-neutral living room in _Winnipeg, Canada_—hadn’t been the girl at all.

It had been Johnny.

Kevin felt the blood rushing into his ears. The world took a kind of like, tilt. Hellebuyck was wrapping up a story about how much he loved his girlfriend or some shit like that, Kevin wasn’t really listening.

“What do you think, Hayesie?” Scheif asked him, leaning forward in his very tasteful beige armchair, all earnest.

“I, uh,” Kevin said, and it was maybe the first time in his life that he could not think of a single thing to say. “Yeah. Man,” which, shit, that was some—what the fuck was it? A like, Freudian thing? From his Intro to Psych class at BC, where he and Johnny had sat together in the back row and played games on their laptops and sometimes their knees had knocked together and Kevin could remember exactly the way Johnny’s eyes crinkled at the corners when he smiled and the specific way his dark hair curled out from under his beanie and—

Oh, shit. He was panicking, maybe.

Scheif was still leaning forward, still looking earnest. Kevin could see black spots dancing in the corners of his eyes. “It’s a lot to take in,” he said. “I know this is probably a different way of thinking about relationships.”

Kevin managed a laugh. It came out a little high-pitched. “Sure is, bud.”

“You’re welcome to talk to me any time,” Scheif added. “About anything at all.”

“I will let you know,” Kevin said, and obviously he never fucking did, because they were busy going on a losing streak and crashing out of the playoffs to the fucking Blues and there was no way he was staying in Winnipeg before that, but afterwards—all he told his agent was _get me the fuck back to the Eastern Conference, dude_. Fortunately the Flyers were interested, and Kevin knew fuck-all about Philadelphia but it was sure better than _Winnipeg_.

And so the last fucking thing he was ever going to do was tell _anyone_ about his little—moment.

Because he could blame it all on Winnipeg, anyway, a city that was so fucking boring that he thought going to _chapel_ with his _alternate captain_ was entertainment.

Anyone stuck up there would start to go a little out of their skull.

That was all.

-

Kevin had a pretty normal summer, after that. He went to Maine, he went to the gym, he cried at his sister’s wedding, he danced with his niece, and then he went home with a bridesmaid and they fucked and she made him scrambled eggs and whole-wheat French toast in the morning like she was trying to audition for something. She was pretty and she had a nice laugh and objectively nice tits, so he even texted her a couple of times, but he was getting busy with his contract shit and looking at condos in Philadelphia and golfing with the boys and it never went anywhere.

But like. He had fucked a bridesmaid, voluntarily. He had screenshotted the snap she sent him of her rack, and he had jerked off to it. Or like, it had been open on his phone and he had jerked off and he had not thought about what Johnny would look like fucking her, or at least he’d only thought about that like, once or twice. Which was basically the same thing.

-

So he was doing fine. He was definitely not into dudes.

-

And like, even if he were, he wouldn’t actually want to like. Date Johnny. Or whoever. Kevin loved Johnny Hockey—Johnny Hockey was his boy in a fully love-you-bro no-homo way, even with the like, _thoughts_ Kevin had been having—but like. They would for sure kill each other, or just passively let each other die, like the houseplants and Christmas trees that Kevin forgot needed to be watered.

All of Kevin’s girlfriends had been pulled-together. Responsible. Thought about shit like getting enough sleep and eating healthy and doing well at school and watering their houseplants. So like, hypothetically, Kevin could maybe admit that some dudes were kind of hot, but that was like, fine—dudes could be hot. Like, objectively. Nobody was going to look at say, Gabriel Landeskog and not think, _fuck that dude is fine_. It was just: factual.

But even if he admitted that his dick, maybe, could, in a certain situation that, to be clear, _did_ involve a woman, kind of get a certain kind of feeling about the dimples in Johnny’s lower back, the straight hard lines of his hips, the way his voice had rumbled around the word _fuck_ right before he came—into a _woman_, because there had been a _woman_ involved in _all_ of this, even if Kevin couldn’t remember her name and her face was kind of fuzzy—but anyway.

There was no universe where he would actually want to like. Wifey up Johnny and his dumbass Yeezys and his fucking ham and cheese sandwiches and Skittles. And like. Dudes had threesomes. On a regular basis. It wasn’t like, a whole thing, just a thing that had happened once in his life, that he didn’t know why he kept thinking about other than that Winnipeg was a fucked-up place that was so boring his brain was fully inventing bullshit, just to have something to think about other than how much Winnipeg sucked, and apparently he needed all summer to like. Detox himself.

-

Then he moved to Philadelphia, and showed up at training camp, and the first thing he saw in the locker room was their kid goalie taking his tarp off. He was stripping off a t-shirt to put on base layers, like dudes did in every locker room Kevin had ever been in, and Kevin was watching the muscles move in his back because it looked like he must have really been getting after it in the off-season but he was still all long and lanky and like, smooth, and Kevin’s body didn’t do any of those things so it was just academic interest.

And then some yahoo yelled something across the room and he turned around and all Kevin saw was every single one of his six-pack—maybe it was more like an eight-pack, honestly—abs and his collarbones and a fluff of un-gelled hair that was either a dark red or a dark brown or he didn’t really know, honestly, but it looked soft and oh, holy shit, he wanted to put his nose in it—he wanted to—

Oh, _shit_.

-

Kevin had never really had to—keep something to himself before. He wasn’t like, a quiet person, not like his new roommate Patty. Training camp was fine, busy enough to keep him occupied; Europe was obviously dope except for that dumbass L; those early-season road trips could go fuck themselves; but now they were back, and he had some breathing room, and he was starting to—to _think_. Again. About absolute bullshit. Like how when he and Johnny went out for dinner after they lost to the Flames in Calgary, just the two of them, he’d spent the whole time thinking, _do I want Johnny Hockey to suck my dick_, and the results had been—inconclusive; like how he’d felt something he’d never felt about one of his girlfriends, ever in his life, which was a lighter-flicker of jealousy when Patty and Hartsy went fishing in Vancouver. Kevin didn’t even like fishing that much: there was too much sitting still and not enough doing shit, and it wasn’t like he and Carter Hart even hung out, anyway.

No, Kevin knocked his knuckles off Hartsy’s helmet after games, and thumped him on the shoulder occasionally, and once he’d handed him a coconut water from a cooler at an early-season barbecue at AV’s house, and that was it, because he definitely did not spend any time thinking about the vees of muscle on his hips or how his nipples were exactly the same shade of pale pink as his lips.

Anyway, Kevin had a second to think, now. And to be totally honest he did not love the direction his brain was squirreling off to; so obviously he needed to keep himself even busier than he had been before.

“Do you wanna,” Kevin said to Patty the day after they beat Vegas, not quite sure what he was about to ask. Go for a walk, get a beer, anything to get out of the house.

“No,” said Patty, and disappeared into his bedroom. The door shut.

Kevin was dumb but he wasn’t dumb enough to knock on Patty’s bedroom door. He had never seen a door that looked so like, _definitively_ closed in his entire life.

He picked up his phone. G had added him to the groupchat a few weeks ago. There was a text thread for “important shit only,” G had said. There was also a whole app situation with different like, topics and threads because someone had apparently flipped their shit last year about how TK and Patty kept getting into fights in the group text. So there was a whole topic-thing titled, “TK and Patty are banned from the server” that was the only place they could post, or something, except Patty was all over the fucking thing and TK was never on his phone so none of it really—made any sense, but whatever.

It was all confusing, anyway. There were three separate threads about golf and four about fishing and like, nine about video games. But at least nobody was hosting chapel sessions to talk about how sex was better if you loved your girlfriend, and Philadelphia was not Winnipeg, so.

Upgrades.

_hey dudes miss you all going out for a beer where’s good_, he texted, into the actual text thread because beer was important, and if he kept sitting in his apartment he might start _thinking_ again.

-

So he went out for a beer with Jake. To be totally honest Jake kind of terrified him, but Jake also knew some cool spots, so that was fine. They talked about Jake’s kid and Kevin’s niece and families and also, how Jake was trying to make shit work with his kid’s mom and it seemed to not be going great and all Kevin could think was, _oh fuck I can’t even imagine_, and he wasn’t sure if he meant having a baby—even though he’d always wanted kids, like a whole entire pack of them—or making shit work with a woman.

Because now it was like, an itch in his brain. Like the kind of thing that because you told yourself you weren’t thinking about it, you actually thought about it all the time; and for Kevin it was, maybe, how little he enjoyed eating pussy, and how every single one of his girlfriends had objectively been a total smoke show who had brains as well as beauty, and how every time anything had gotten even slightly difficult he had bailed, not because he didn’t think they were pretty or like, worthy of his respect (fuck you, Mark Scheifele), but because he had just never understood why it would be worth the effort. Like, why should he bother to try hard to make things work with a girl, when he could be playing hockey or chilling with his buddies or seeing his family or literally anything else.

But here was Jake Voracek, who looked more like Gritty than any human being had a right to, who was deeply chaotic, who had a fucking _baby_ and was talking about _putting in the work_ to straighten things out with his girl like that was _the_ most important thing he could be doing.

“Yeah man,” Kevin told him, nodding earnestly. “I totally get that,” he lied.

-

Patty had reemerged by the time Kevin got home. He was glowering at the TV. “TK’s coming over,” he mumbled. “He’s picking up takeout on the way, do you want some sushi.”

Kevin wanted sushi. Sushi made him think of Johnny Hockey and his dumb ass walking across the street to get a chicken sub and bringing it back into a nice-ass sushi restaurant, which made him think of Johnny’s ass, which made him think about how it wasn’t as good as Carter’s ass, which made him think he was maybe in a like—crisis state.

He plonked himself down on the opposite side of the sofa’s L from Patty and dropped his face into his hands. He was _twenty fucking seven years old_. He was too old for this shit.

“Hartsy,” he said, before he’d really thought about it, which wasn’t unusual for Kevin but he thought he’d been doing a better job of keeping that shit locked down.

“What about him?” Patty asked. He had his giant feet propped up on the coffee table and was scrolling aimlessly through Netflix.

“Nothing,” Kevin said, then, “Like, who does he hang out with? He seems like he kind of keeps to himself. I dunno. Just wondering. Got the A and shit, want to make sure guys are doing okay,” and then he shut his mouth because he absolutely _did not_ need to keep talking about Carter Hart like, ever.

Patty shrugged. “He’s chill.”

“You two hang out sometimes.” He was thinking about their fishing trip in Vancouver.

“Yeah.”

“But not like you and TK.”

Patty rolled his eyes. Kevin abruptly felt sorry for his parents—was this what it felt like to parent a teenager? All black clothes and feet on the furniture and eye rolls and monosyllabic answers, even if none of those things had been Kevin’s jam, personally. He fucking loved his parents. “Duh.”

-

They sat and watched Netflix trailers until TK showed up with four bags of sushi. Shit got more normal then—TK was energetic, noisy, not like Nolan, who was manifesting some real black hole of moodiness and emotion shit. Kevin knew he was going through it with the migraines, and it wasn’t like he blamed him for being down about it; but it was nice to see how he perked up when TK was around, pretending not to laugh at his bad jokes and rolling his eyes with like, tolerance and affection rather than barely-concealed rage.

It was nice. That was all. They elbowed each other constantly and sat close enough together to steal sushi off each other’s plates and seemed to only communicate via insults.

Kevin didn’t want to say that he _wanted_ that, necessarily. He had brothers, he had buddies, he liked TK and Patty and all the guys on the team; but, whatever. He didn’t know. It was just that there was no one here who really _knew_ him like that, who could drag him out of a bad mood with a couple of strategically-deployed chirps and a platter of dragon rolls. They were just like, _easy_ around each other. Comfortable. Kind of like—Kevin had never been with one of his girlfriends.

“I think I’m gonna try a dating app,” he said, into a momentary lull in TK’s chatter, because maybe all this freakout shit was just because he hadn’t met the right girl yet. (_You’re twenty-seven_, his brain said, but he was ignoring it. _You would have met a girl you wanted to fuck by now if you were going to_, but that wasn’t something he was paying attention to.)

Both TK and Patty blinked at him. Then Patty narrowed his eyes and snuck a piece of rainbow roll off TK’s unguarded plate, while TK was beaming, because of course he was one of those fuckheads who loved love.

“I think Hartsy’s doing that,” he said. “Or he was like, researching apps or something.”

“Of course he would be _researching apps_,” Patty mumbled around his mouthful of TK’s sushi. “Fucking Carter, are you kidding.”

“Maybe he can give you some tips,” TK said.

_Maybe he’ll go on a date with me instead_, said Kevin’s panic-brain, which was not the same as his real brain. “Yeah,” he answered instead.

Then Patty said, muffled by yet another one of TK’s sushi rolls, “I don’t think anyone should be taking dating advice from Carter, have you _met_ him,” and once more Kevin’s panic-brain wanted to say, _I have and he’s_ perfect. Even though he like, verifiably wasn’t: he was a total control freak and spent way too much time in Whole Foods and got all pink-cheeked and offended whenever anyone chirped him for it. Not that Kevin like, knew what he looked like when he got pink-cheeked and offended, or had noticed the annoyed little line he got between his eyebrows, or thought one single time about how much he’d like to kiss it away.

“Are you okay?” TK asked him, after a second. “You look a little—pale.”

“I’m great,” Kevin lied. “Never been better. Hey, wanna help me get this fucking app set up?”

Patty said “No,” and TK bounced in place so enthusiastically that he almost dumped what remained of his plate of sushi on the floor, and fifteen minutes later Kevin had Tinder.

“Never used this before,” he said, swiping left on a dark-haired girl with kind of too many tats for him to take home to Dorchester.

“Me neither.” TK looked fascinated; Patty looked bored out of his skull, which was par for the course. As far as Kevin could tell, he only perked up for hockey, takeout, and when TK hit the buzzer downstairs. “Oh, she’s pretty!” he said about the next one. Patty made a displeased noise and pulled out his own phone, presumably to scroll through the fake twitter that he refused to admit he had.

She was—she looked like Laughts' girlfriend. Laughts' girlfriend was a smoke show. “She looks too much like Laughts' girlfriend,” Kevin said, and swiped left.

“Dude that’s not a _bad_ thing.” TK sounded scandalized. Then a few minutes later, “Hey, what’s your type, anyway? You haven’t swiped right on like, anyone.”

“Dunno,” Kevin said. “Just not feeling it, I guess.”

The next girl was a tall, athletic redhead, Kevin saw with a sinking sensation in the bottom of his stomach. She had really nice cheekbones and dark red hair cut off at her collarbones, and she was doing sports stuff in all but her first picture: smiling on a soccer field, shooting a layup, wrapped in one of those silver space blanket things after a half marathon.

“She looks chill as hell,” TK pronounced. Nolan made another disagreeable sound, which he seemed to do every time TK said something nice about one of the Tinder girls. Which, like, _rude_, but that was kind of his default setting and TK didn’t seem to give a shit, anyway.

Kevin swiped right.

-

“So the guys say you’re doing like, online dating,” Kevin said to Carter, after skate the next morning. Everyone was just loitering around waiting for lunch to get served, and normally Kevin would have steered the fuck clear but like, this was a normal thing to talk to your teammate about: going on dates with women.

Carter shrugged. Kevin did not pay any particular attention to the way he could see his collarbone moving under the thin fabric of his t-shirt. It looked soft. He wondered if it would be as soft as it looked, if he touched it, not that he would just like—reach out and pet his buddy’s t-shirt.

Well. He would, actually.

Or he would have before fucking _Winnipeg_ had made him start—_thinking_ all this shit.

Carter was talking. Kevin should be listening to the words he was saying, instead of looking at the way his throat moved when he swallowed. “—figured, why not, you know?”

“Oh, totally.” Kevin nodded. “How’s it going for you, dude? Like have you. You know. Met anyone yet?”

Carter blushed. Shit fucking goddamn, Kevin was feeling normal buddy shit about everything going on in front of him right now. “Yeah, a few times. Nothing like, serious, but I’ve met a couple of interesting people.”

“That’s great, dude,” Kevin said. “Good luck out there, man,” he added, then, “We can like, compare date spots,” and he was definitely imagining that Carter was looking a little—squirrelly; or maybe he wasn’t, because goalies were weird and who the fuck knew what was going through their heads.

“Sure, Hayesie,” Carter said, like it was a brush-off, and maybe it was, because the dining guys were setting out the lunch platters and getting first crack at the teriyaki chicken was never the _wrong_ move. And Kevin wasn’t like, _noticing_ who Carter went to sit with at lunch; or fuck it, fine, maybe he did, but he had an A and it was his job to keep an eye on guys, right? and anyway Carter was sitting with Moose and Steady Eddie and the old-timers, anyway, and they were all married and it wasn’t like he’d be swapping first date spots with them, either.

Kevin sat with Teeks. All Teeks wanted to talk about was Patty, so nothing new, there.

-

And that was like, basically how things went for a few weeks. Kevin was used to being—liked. Like, he was used to being buddies with all the guys, and mostly he was: he liked the coaching staff, AV was—okay, not his boy, AV was definitely not his boy, AV was his coach and Kevin respected the shit out of him—but everyone else was his dude.

Except for Carter, kind of? Like not in a weird way—Kevin wasn’t a complete fucking dumbass, no matter what his siblings said, and he knew that he wasn’t actually going to be best buddies with every single guy on his team (‘cause he certainly hadn’t been in Winnipeg) (but like, he was really trying not to think about anything related to Winnipeg because: fuck Winnipeg) (and fuck thinking) (and fuck thinking about fucking Carter, because he definitely wasn’t).

But like. Carter kind of—ignored him, mostly.

Not to the extent where Kevin could really be like, _this dude is ignoring me_, but instead like: Carter was always on the far end of the table at team dinner, and Carter was never in the same section of the plane (which: fine, Carter always sat in the exact same seat, and yes, Kevin had accidentally sat in it one time at the beginning of the season but it wasn’t like he had _known_), and if Kevin said something to him within a few words he had some coach he needed to talk to, some piece of gear he had to pick up or put down, some errand he was on his way to.

He tried to ease his way into asking Patso about it, because he hung out with Carter, some—prairie boy-genius solidarity, or whatever. He should have known better: Patty just shot him an annoyed look and shook his hair out of his face and scored on him in ‘Chel. TK had nothing even vaguely helpful to offer from where he was sitting next to Patty on the couch, feet in his lap.

“I didn’t know I was getting two roommates for the price of one,” Kevin said.

Patty rolled his eyes and TK grinned. “Yeah, fun, right?”

“Maybe when your deadbeat ass starts paying rent, Tiki Bar.”

“Please,” Patty said, because he was the only one allowed to insult TK. “He’s tiny and it’s not like you don’t have the space.”

“Maybe you could even have your own room,” Kevin offered, “if you contributed more than sushi and chirps.”

“I buy beer,” TK said, indignant.

“Only shitty beer.”

Even Patty couldn’t argue with that, but his stupid Leafs scored on Kevin again immediately, so.

-

While Kevin was busy not bromancing Carter, he was also going out with the girl from Tinder. Her name was Lara and she was in a master’s program for athletic training at Temple and she made him laugh and when he showed G her picture, he let out a low whistle and slapped him on the back and said to _get in there, Hayesie_, so that was going well.

The only problem was that it turned out he didn’t want to fuck her.

He _wanted_ to want to fuck her.

But he was slowly realizing—his sincerest _fuck you_, again, to Mark Scheifele and his fucking _worksheets_—that wasn’t quite the same thing as trust and passion and, whatever, desire. Like, Kevin enjoyed hanging out with her: she was basically a dude with boobs. Big laugh, well-informed opinions about the AFC East, the only daughter in a big Italian family with four brothers. He could very easily see his mom loving her, see exactly how she’d fit in at the Hayes household every Sunday that the Pats were playing.

Again: he _wanted_ to want to fuck her, but there they were, on their third date at a nice brewery, and he was having fun but he was also like. Worried. That she was going to, to expect something—he thought she would, she was laughing a lot, leaning in, touching his elbow and asking to steal sips from his beer—and that he would either have to brush her off, or—_do_ something about it.

Like, for example, have sex with her.

And he didn’t know which option was less appealing. He was still trying to figure it out when she said “Oh, shit!” and pointed over his shoulder. “Isn’t that Carter Hart?”

Of course it was Carter Hart. He was leaning one elbow up against the bar, peering up at the beer menu with a tall, broad-shouldered dude who must be one of his buddies. Kevin hadn’t known Carter had buddies off the team, but obviously he did. They looked friendly, standing close enough together for their elbows to touch.

Carter had such a nice profile. And he’d just turned 21, hadn’t he? It was nice that he had someone who looked a little older to go to a nice brewery with, instead of just hanging out at the trashy college-aged places with TK and the rookies.

The buddy said something that made Carter laugh. He also had a really nice laugh, even though Kevin wasn’t close enough to the bar to hear it. But he knew what it sounded like and he knew how Carter’s eyes squeezed halfway shut when he was laughing and probably everyone noticed shit like that about their buddies, didn’t they? Like you couldn’t tell him Teeks didn’t have every single variation of Patty’s bitchy faces memorized.

Granted, Teeks and Patty were notably obsessed with each other. But that was just buddies, right?

Shit—did that mean _Kevin_ was obsessed with Carter Hart? That Kevin had been obsessed with Johnny Hockey, and Jimmy Vesey from way back in juniors, and Robbie Warynski who lived next to his family until sixth grade? That like—maybe—his whole little—situation hadn’t _actually_ been caused by Mark Scheifele and the city of Winnipeg, but had in fact been going on basically—his entire fucking _life_?

“Shit,” he said out loud.

Lara blinked at him, because right. She was still there. They were on a date with each other. He was out in public on a date with a woman, and it wasn’t like everyone knew who he was in Philly or anything, but he should—yeah. He should act more normal that he was currently acting.

“Do the two of you not get along, or something?” she asked, and it took him a second to figure out what she meant.

“Who, Hartsy?”

“Yeah.”

“We’re cool,” Kevin said. “Uh, funny story, he’s also doing the whole dating-app thing too.”

“Huh.” She took a sip of her beer. “I didn’t know he was, uh, gay. I mean, that’s cool, obviously, I just didn’t know.”

“What?” Kevin couldn’t breathe. Could this woman like—see inside his brain? Was it that obvious? “I—what?”

She nodded over towards the bar. Carter was laughing again and his buddy was leaning in closer. “Like, that’s a date, right?”

“I thought that was his buddy.”

She wrinkled her nose and shrugged. “I mean, maybe.”

It was suddenly important that Kevin—know. “I’m gonna go say hi.”

“Don’t crash his date,” she hissed. “God, especially if he’s not _out_.”

Kevin was opening his mouth to say—he didn’t even know, something, just words, when Carter glanced over and saw them.

His face—froze.

Kevin felt his face freezing right back. But like—if Carter really _was_ gay, and he was out here on a fucking _date_, and he thought Kevin was like, judging him when Kevin was, in fact—fucking shit—thinking about how _he’d_ like to be the one making him laugh, how _he’d_ like to be the one leaning in to see if his skin smelled like the soap from the showers at the SkateZone or if he was one of the guys who brought his own stuff—he probably would, he was all precise and particular, nothing but the best going into or onto that body—

“Well I gotta go say hey now or it’s gonna look weird,” Kevin said out loud, and left Lara sitting at their little two-top table to walk over to the bar. “Hey, man.”

“Hayesie,” Carter said. He looked—he looked really good, actually, like he’d made an effort with his hair, maybe gotten one of the guys on FaceTime to help him pick out a t-shirt in a color other than black or gray. It was blue. It made his eyes look—nice, set off the red in his hair. He was blushing, a little, and had taken a step away from his probably-not-a-buddy-after-all.

“What’s up, bud?”

“Just getting a drink,” he said, with his lips that were way too pink to like, be allowed.

“You don’t drink, though,” Kevin said. “Not during the—” He stopped, because he didn’t know if this alleged _buddy_ knew who they were, knew if he should use a word like _season_.

Carter rolled his eyes, a little. “It’s kombucha.”

“Is that a kind of beer?” He hadn’t heard of it. He was a beer guy. He would have heard of it. He did know things. At least, some things.

“It’s like, tea,” Carter told him. “It’s really good for you.”

“Is it,” Kevin said, staring at Carter’s pint glass of kom-whatever and thinking about the lip print on its rim.

“Hi,” said the alleged buddy, from over Carter’s shoulder. “You are—?”

“Kevin,” Carter said quickly. “We uh, work together.”

“Nice to meet you, man,” Kevin said, trying to mean it, trying not to think about whether this dude was actually Carter’s buddy or like, why else they could be in this brewery together on a sunny Saturday afternoon, why Carter wouldn’t have told this guy who was probably his buddy what his job was, unless, holy shit, Kevin _was_ actually crashing Carter Hart’s gay internet date.

The guy put out his hand and tried to do that dumb-shit thing where like, squeezed way too hard to prove some kind of dumbass nonsense. Kevin was a professional athlete and Kevin’s grip strength was nothing to fuck with, so, sucked to be this guy, actually.

Kevin stared him right in the eye and squeezed back harder. Figured he’d made his point—he didn’t know what his point was, but whatever—and retreated back to his table with Lara. He told himself he wasn’t going to keep watching Carter and his not-a-buddy but he kind of failed at doing that. They looked like they weren’t having as good of a time now, anyway—they were standing farther apart, and Carter wasn’t laughing as much.

“Sorry, what?” Kevin said, because Lara had maybe asked him something.

She repeated herself and Kevin did his best to focus on the story she was telling him about one of Temple’s football players, instead of how Carter was waving off the offer of another drink, instead of wondering whether they were leaving together, because it was none of his business except for, shit, he _wanted_ it to be.

He wouldn’t give a shit if Lara saw the man of her dreams across the room and ditched him.

He’d be grateful, because it would mean he wouldn’t have to let her down politely.

Oh, holy fucking shit. He, Kevin Patrick Hayes, was twenty-seven years old and he was definitely gay for his twenty-one-year-old goalie with the face and the abs and he was realizing it in the Goose Island brewery while he was on a date with a woman who did, now that he was thinking about it, look enough like Carter Hart to be his sister, and it was—

He as laughing. Loudly, in the middle of Lara’s story, at a part that was not funny enough to explain why he was verging on like, hysterical.

“Sorry, I’ve got to go,” he managed. He fumbled out his wallet, dropped like three twenties on the table, and walked out.

-

When he got back to his car, he put his head down on the steering wheel and tried to breathe. He was an adult, okay: he could handle this. Just because he was apparently gay—like actually gay, like he wanted to smell Carter’s neck and put his hand all over his abs, see how wide his fingers could spread out across his lower belly, maybe—oh, _shit_—maybe see what Carter would look like with that pretty pink mouth full of Kevin’s dick, his lips all slick with spit, whether he’d keep his eyes closed or stare up Kevin’s body with those gorgeous fucking green-blue eyes—

And _fuck_, that wasn’t all Kevin wanted to do. Kevin wanted to kiss him; yes, Kevin _definitely_ wanted to fuck him, so much that even the thought of it had him pressing the heel of his hand down over his jeans; but like.

Kevin wanted to take him on dates. Kevin wanted to learn all his favorite weird health food things. Kevin wanted to hold his hand and let him fall asleep on his shoulder and let him win at whatever his favorite video game was and put his organic hair products all over his bathroom and have a joint Google calendar like his sister and her new husband and Kevin wanted to—do all of the shit that he’d never been interested in letting one of his girlfriends do.

Because Kevin was gay.

And he specifically, wanted to be gay with the Flyers’ baby franchise goalie.

Who was maybe also gay, if that guy had in fact been one of the people Carter was trying to date on the internet, and if Kevin hadn’t hallucinated everything that had happened to him since that fucking Wednesday night in Mark Scheifele’s living room—

So basically. If that guy was the kind of guy that Carter wanted to go on dates with, if this wasn’t all some kind of delusional like. Waking nightmare—it wasn’t totally, maybe, out of the question that Carter might—

Kevin didn’t know like, that much about being gay. Other than that he was, apparently, and that Carter was, maybe. But—Kevin did know that he was taller than the guy Carter either had or hadn’t been on a date with. Bigger. Better beard. Didn’t have the same suggestion of softness around his midsection. No douchebag black-framed glasses.

Kevin was, actually—holy shit.

Kevin was the upgraded version of the dude Carter was on a date with.

-

He didn’t know what to do with any of this, really. Didn’t know where to go from here, where “here” was parked in his car on some street in Philadelphia with his head on the steering wheel, having a crisis that was a _huge fucking deal_ and also felt, simultaneously, like everything else in his life made more sense, like something was shifting into place that had been right of center forever: like lying on a table in the training room, and letting one of the trainers shove his ribcage until something snapped back into place, leaving a clean, healing ache behind.

-

He went home, because that was all he could do.

Patty and TK were in the exact same position that he’d left them in: bracketing two ends of the couch, arguing about Call of Duty.

“How was your date?” TK asked, popping up over the back of the couch like a demented gopher.

“I saw Hartsy,” he said. “Does—” He stopped. Kevin didn’t really know that much about how to like. Choose his words and stuff, usually he just _talked_, but—

Patty was angling himself up over the back of the couch more slowly. He looked—not exactly scowl-y, but pre-scowl-y, like one wrong word and he was going to unleash the whole Nolan Patrick Super Bitch mode. Kevin had managed to stay out of its detonation range so far and he was not like, _eager_ to put himself in its crosshairs, but also Patty and Carter hung out, at least sometimes.

“Is there like,” he tried, “something I should. Know. About that. Like, his whole. Dating. Situation.”

“Dunno,” Patty said. “Did you try asking him? Because if there was something he wanted you to know, he’d probably tell you.”

TK was blinking along with Patty’s sentence, ended up with his head tilted to one side. “Hey, Pats. I think Hayesie’s trying to say he like—saw Hartsy. On a date.”

“He was just—at the brewery,” Kevin said, feeling bizarrely like he had to defend himself. “In public. With a, a person.”

“A _person_.”

“A _man_, okay, _Jesus_,” Kevin halfway yelled. “_Was_ Carter Hart on a date with a man, or was he _not_ on a date with a man.” He was definitely yelling by the end of it and Patty was levering himself up to his full height, face like a thundercloud.

“What the _fuck_ would it matter to you if he was.”

“It would matter a _fuck_ of a lot!” Kevin yelled. “Because then I could—”

He managed to cut himself off before he said anything like. Fully incriminating. But also, he was getting the sense, from the silence that was dragging across his living room, that he hadn’t had to say anything, actually. Patty’s face had gotten stuck mid-snarl, but slowly began to relax itself; TK had his head tilted to the side, chewing on his lip.

“You could what?” TK asked him, swinging up off the couch to come stand next to Patty.

“Uh,” said Kevin.

“It’s cool,” TK said. He leaned into Patty’s shoulder. “Like, dude, you are among friends or whatever.” He gestured at the nonexistent space between his body and Pat’s: they were pressed together in one long line from TK’s shoulder all the way down to his ankles. Patty slowly wrapped an arm around his neck, thumb on his collarbone in a way that was—not actually buddies, it turned out, from the way TK grinned and kind of—preened into it, and Patty’s self-satisfied little smirk.

“What,” said Kevin, and then he urgently had to sit down and put his head between his legs and try to breathe because this was—officially too fucking much, okay! Like, he was gay, and maybe Hartsy was gay, and _also_ his emo roommate was fucking his little rat king redneck liney, and—“Holy fucking shit,” he said, “is _everyone_ on the fucking _team_ gay?”

“Nope,” TK said cheerfully. “Just me and Pats and Carts and you, I guess. Well, I’m bi, but.” His footsteps retreated towards the kitchen, and Kevin heard the fridge door open and close, then the pop-hiss of the cap of a beer. “Drink this, you’ll feel better.”

“Do people _know_,” Kevin asked, wrapping his fingers around the bottle. The glass was cold under his fingertips, a reassuring shape and weight that had helped him through all kinds of shit before, hadn’t it? Granted not anything _this_ heavy—the only other thing in his life like this shit had been his injury junior year at BC, and he’d been on better drugs than alcohol for that one.

“Uhm,” said TK. Kevin felt the couch dip as he sat down, and then thumped a hand between his shoulders. “Depends.”

Kevin could see Patty’s bare feet come into his line of vision. “Hartsy’s not really like—in public about it.”

“Well, we’re not really in public about it,” TK pointed out, kicking one of Nolan’s ankles.

“People know, though.”

“We can’t really _hide_ it, either,” Patty said. “Because TK’s such a fucking dumpster fire.” His voice was affectionate, though, and looking back Kevin wasn’t quite sure how he would have missed it—Patty was right, TK was about as subtle as a cross-check to the chin. Kevin wasn’t sure what it said about his like—what the fuck was it—gaydar? Or whatever—that he hadn’t noticed; it was only that it would never even have _occurred_ to him to notice.

“Hartsy was in public, though,” Kevin pointed out. “Like, with a guy.”

“Could have been a buddy,” TK said. Kevin pulled his head out from between his knees in time to see him shrug, roll his shoulders like he did when he was thinking. “People usually see what they want to see, ya know? Like you did.”

“I guess.” He took a belated sip of his beer. “Shit, dude. Just—shit.”

TK made a face. “So, uh, I guess we could like, talk about it? About—stuff. If you wanted to do that?”

Kevin was pretty sure he and Pats had identical expressions of horror on their faces.

“Or we could keep playing CoD,” Pat deadpanned. “Hm. Wonder which one we’d all rather do.”

“Talk about _feelings_, duh,” TK said, his mobile face settling into its crooked grin. “I know you love that shit, you fucking shithead,” but he was reaching over to grab a controller and shoving it into Kevin’s hand, so—okay.

Maybe this was all going to be—okay.

-

A few days later, Kevin had to admit that Carter was definitely ignoring him. He hadn’t been, before; he’d at least like, acknowledge Kevin if he spoke directly to him.

But now, yeah, fucking fantastic, Carter was actively pretending he didn’t exist and Kevin could see the difference. If Kevin was somewhere, Carter was somewhere else; if Kevin opened his mouth to start talking to him—not even about like, _gay_ shit like how his eyes were pretty, or did he want to go to dinner, or how Kevin got distracted every time he thought about his abs—Jesus, his abs were works of fucking _art_; Kevin had not been to the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Art yet but he doubted it had any shit in it that he’d rather look at—but anyway, Kevin wasn’t trying to talk to him about any of that. Just like, practice or the weather: but Carter was already turning to talk to Elliott or Provy or whoever else.

The only time Carter would talk to him was out on the ice, where he kind of had to for like, his job. And Carter took that shit serious.

Good. He should. Kevin did, too, but unfortunately Kevin also thought it was hot as fuck when Carter went all icy and composed, locked into the action on the ice with his jaw set and his eyes determined.

While he was skating, Kevin wasn’t thinking about how hot it would be to have all of that _focus_ directed towards him—or alternatively, how hot it would be to get him so shaken up that he couldn’t focus at all—because Kevin did, actually, have a job to do. Kill penalties, score shorties, and it wasn’t like hockey was a slow enough game that he had time to stand around reflecting on how flexible Carter was.

But he could think about it afterward: when he was lining up to pull Carter into his chest after a W, patting his helmet and wondering what it would feel like to touch his hair, his body, without the layers of pads in between them; when he was at home in bed, and now that he’d let himself start thinking about Carter it was like he couldn’t stop: the sounds he’d make, whether he’d bite his lip, exactly where his tan lines started, what it would feel like to touch his dick or the hard, flat planes of his chest. What it would feel like to curl up with him on the couch the way Patty and TK did, now that Kevin knew: all chirps and bumping knees and sharp elbows, but then every once in a while Patty would look down at the top of TK’s head with an expression of such, whatever, _softness_, unnatural on his mean fucking face; or TK would drop a kiss on his shoulder with a bright-edged grin; and Kevin would think _I want that_ with a kind of—ferocity he’d never felt before. Hadn’t even known he could feel, really.

He’d thumb through his contacts and hover over the one for Hartsy, and not know what to say. Patty had flatly refused to get involved—_talk to him yourself_, he’d mumbled—and TK had made one of his crooked little TK faces and gone along with it.

Carter didn’t want to talk to Kevin, though, that much was clear. Kevin knew he wasn’t like, the most _aware_ guy on the team, but he also liked to think he wasn’t a total shithead, either; and if Carter didn’t want to talk to him, Kevin didn’t want to be like _fully_ panting along after him, even if that was what it felt like sometimes.

Just like, panting from the other side of the locker room. Low key on Instagram.

A respectful distance.

Whatever.

-

It maybe would have stayed that way for longer if he hadn’t come home from skate one day—quietly, Patty’s head had been acting up in the morning, so that was all he was thinking about, not rattling his keys around or walking too loudly—and found Carter Hart in his kitchen, making lunch.

“Um,” said Kevin, because he was a genius. “Dude.”

Carter smiled at him politely—and of course he was polite, he was always polite. “Hayesie.”

“You’re—here,” Kevin said. Carter looked good in his kitchen. He was wearing the same boring shit he always wore: black track pants and a gray t-shirt, with a Flyers hat on backwards. The orange looked really bad with his hair. Kevin tried to think about that instead of thinking about his ass, or his abs.

“I asked Patty if he wanted to have lunch.”

“Is he feeling better?”

“I’m fine,” Patty snapped, emerging from the back hallway. He didn’t look—great. He was a little pale and his hair was greasier than usual, but if he was upright and bitching at people he was usually on the road to recovery.

“I’m making stir fry,” Carter said. He smiled down at the pan, a little, like he was proud. Kevin hadn’t known that he owned it, other than that he’d told his interior decorator to make sure his kitchen had all the necessary shit. He and Patty didn’t like, fuck with cooking. “People say it’s pretty good.”

“Sounds great,” Kevin said. “I’ll, uh. Go get some takeout or whatever, I guess, you guys have a good lunch.”

“Don’t be a dumb fuck,” Patty said. He yanked open the refrigerator door like it had personally offended him and cracked open a can of sparkling water. “Stay for lunch.”

“Okayyy,” Kevin said, slowly. Patty was staring at him like he was trying to communicate with psychic powers like in those X-men movies, but Kevin was not a mutant or whatever so he didn’t get what Patty was trying to beam into his brain. “What, Pats?”

Patty rolled his eyes. “Whatever.”

-

And then they like, ate lunch together. Kevin complimented Carter’s stir fry—it was actually pretty good, but maybe he was a little, like, overkill, because Patty rolled his eyes again and maybe tried to kick him under the table, but hit Carter instead. Then Kevin kicked Patty back because _you don’t hit the goalie, dickhead_ and Carter protested that he could like, take a kick, and then it was—normal, actually. Lunch with two buddies. Like the million lunches with buddies Kevin had been having since he joined the league. Fuck, even before then, because what the hell else had he done in college but eat food with other dudes?

Which all went to say: it was normal.

And that was nice. Because like, Kevin could just be a normal gay dude, eating food with two other dudes who were also apparently—gay? And like yes they were both his coworkers and he did want to fuck one of them, actually—like a lot, like worse by the minute, like his brain was going all kinds of places like _what would Carter look like bent over the back of his couch_, or _would Carter laugh sitting at this exact table in the mornings before Kevin brought him coffee_, and shit maybe that was less _I want to fuck you_ and more like _I want to date you_—but it was also like. Chill: shooting the shit about video games and Patty’s bad taste in music, and Carter’s taste in music that turned out to be bad in a totally different way, and letting Carter tell him a bunch of shit about comic books because if Carter was into that, Kevin could be interested, even if Patty was rolling his eyes and kind of being a bitch. But that was his default setting and Kevin was used to it, mostly, and Carter didn’t seem to care that much either.

So: lunch. They had it, and then Patty hit them with a massive eye-roll (expected) and an offer to do the dishes (unheard-of) while they fired up Mario Kart. Carter perched himself on the lounge chair: he went all focused and quiet and intense, like he did on the ice, eyebrows furrowed and his stupidly like, _plush_ mouth pressed together, and maybe if Kevin spent as much time paying attention to Baby Peach as he did to the way Carter kind of inched himself from side to side in his chair, like he could get Yoshi around the corners faster by pure willpower alone—

Well, maybe then Carter wouldn’t have beaten him in three straight rounds of Mario Kart.

But that was okay. He was smiling, looking pleased with himself.

“You can beat me in Mario Kart any time you want,” Kevin said without thinking. Then “Uh, I mean. If you like, wanted to, I guess.”

Carter blinked. Kevin knew he was a sore fucking loser—he’d been in the locker room after he got pulled in that disaster of a game against the Oilers; he knew Carter’s mental game was great but that he like, needed an hour or two to decompress—but he was usually pretty gracious in victory. “I like Mario Kart,” he said, then added with a quiet little smile, “It’s kind of my favorite, you know?”

Kevin wanted to know his favorite everything: his favorite color, his favorite smoothie order, his favorite Whole Foods in Philadelphia, his favorite yoga studio. Holy hell, Kevin would _go to a yoga class_ for Carter. A few of his exes had wanted him to come along and he’d basically laughed in their faces: but here he was, like, proactively offering to go to yoga with Carter. Inside his brain, not out loud, but still.

“I would go to yoga with you,” he said. So much for the whole _inside his brain_ thing: Kevin had never been any good at that. “’Cause Patsy says you go and I hear it’s really good for like, flexibility and stuff,” and oh, shit, Carter was _flexible_, wasn’t he. It wasn’t like Kevin didn’t know that: he saw him stretching in the gym all the time, had even jerked off about it a few times, which certainly hadn’t helped—anything.

But here he was, sitting in his living room alone with Carter—where the fuck was Patty, anyway? The water had stopped running in the kitchen and there was still no sign of that fuckhead, even though he usually wouldn’t miss an opportunity to knock Kevin off the track with his stupid Toad bullshit—thinking about how nice Carter’s hair looked against the color of his upholstery, wanting to lick the long column of his throat, thinking about how he could do the splits and the way his back muscles moved under his base layers when he did his little yoga flow-things. And Jesus, his ass! His ass, when he did that spine-stretch thingie where he hollowed out his back and pushed his chest forward and stuck his ass in the air, exactly like he would if Kevin had a hand wrapped around his neck and was fucking him on his hands and knees.

Kevin coughed.

Carter was blinking at him, his eyebrows doing an inquisitive little motion. “You—want to go to…yoga.”

“Yeah, Hayesie,” Pats said, appearing out of nowhere and flopping onto the couch next to Kevin. “You want to go to yoga?”

“Injury prevention, buddies,” he said. “It’s serious business, okay? Patty, do you do yoga?”

Patty twitched a lip and pulled out his phone, which meant _no_, and also _stop talking to me_, and also, _I’m too good for this shit_. Also possibly, _TK texted me_. He was a man of mystery.

Carter still looked confused, his pretty-ass eyes flicking from Patso to Kevin and back. “Okay,” he said, finally, and then started telling Kevin about all the health benefits of yoga and what to expect from his first class, and what to wear, and did he have a yoga mat, and shit, this maybe sounded more complicated than Kevin had expected?

“Hartsy,” Pat interjected, finally, when Carter was mostly through trying to explain to Kevin what the fuck a _sun salutation_ was, and Kevin just—wasn’t getting it, because he kept thinking about Carter’s abs, and the like, one yoga pose he did know by name, which was downward dog, which was another one of the ones where you stuck out your ass, which was—a thought. That he would probably be thinking about later, by himself.

“Oh, uh,” Carter said, stumbling to a stop. “I guess it’s better if you just—do it? I usually go on Thursday nights if we don’t have a game.

“Thursday,” Kevin said. “It’s a date,” Kevin said, like a complete fucking idiot, and like, Kevin was pretty used to sounding like an idiot—he didn’t care, really—but for once he wished he could like. Be cool. Not Patty levels of _I don’t have time for this bullshit_, just like, medium-chill. Provy chill. Steady Eddie chill. Some level of chill.

“See you Thursday,” Carter answered, then did another thing with his eyebrows and blushed. “Um, I mean. Tomorrow, actually. For practice.”

“You’re going to Toronto tomorrow,” Patty pointed out, still staring at his phone. “Not practice.”

“Right,” Carter said. He blushed a little more. He didn’t blush like Patty did—nobody Kevin had ever seen in his life blushed like Patso—but he definitely blushed. On Carter it was—cute, actually, not like that was a fucking surprise. “Definitely. I knew that.”

-

Yoga was—an experience. In like, a lot of ways, in that Kevin found muscles in his lower back that he didn’t know he had, and figured out that his hamstring flexibility left a _lot_ to be desired in comparison with all these super-bendy yoga people.

Of which Carter was definitely, unfortunately, one.

He met Kevin in the lobby of the yoga studio carrying his mat in a little backpack-thing over his shoulder, wearing a track pants that sure did not cover very much and a tank top that covered even less.

“You really want to do this,” he said.

“Course,” Kevin told him, or told his collarbones, which was as low on Carter’s body as he was letting his eyes go. “Our goalie said it was really good for injury prevention and shit, and he’s really on top of shit like that, yeah?”

Carter smiled, the way he did whenever anyone said he was good at something. Because he was a stone cold weirdo he answered with, “He tries to be.”

Kevin followed him into the studio. They had the heat cranked up pretty high, which Kevin did not love—he played ice hockey, not like, beach volleyball—and Carter showed him the closet full of mats and helpful little props for old people and yoga idiots like Kevin. The dumbass part of Kevin’s brain wanted to not take the little block-things, but the part of Kevin’s brain that was a professional athlete that would get actually murdered by Alain Vigneault if he pulled something in a yoga class that he was only going to because he was thirsty for their twenty-one-year-old goalie, kicked in and got him to pick up the little block-things.

Carter gave him an approving nod and another little smile. Kevin tried not to feel like, all warm inside about it: Carter had never looked at him like that before, at least not off the ice.

They got their mats set up and the class started. Carter mumbled out of the side of his mouth that the teacher was a substitute, one he hadn’t taken a class with before; and Kevin sincerely hoped this wasn’t what yoga was like all the time, because it was like. An hour straight of being told to align his sacral chakra—Kevin didn’t even know what a chakra was—and this weird thing where you had to close off one side of your nose at a time and like, breathe, and it was supposed to reduce anxiety, but Kevin’s anxiety was not reduced because like: reduced oxygen flow was not something he really aspired to, no matter how beneficial the hippy-dippy teacher said it was for his cardiovascular function. Kevin’s cardiovascular function was _fine_, thanks. Better than the teacher’s, for sure.

“Is this for real,” he mumbled to Carter out of the side of his mouth.

Carter had his eyes shut and was like, mindfully engaging with the weird nostril thing. “It’s good to take your practice in a new direction sometimes.”

“You can’t _enjoy_ this,” he hissed.

Carter opened one eye to glare at him, his eyebrow drawing down. “_Ssh_.”

Kevin ssh-ed and heaved a sigh and only pretended to keep doing the nose thing. Then once they were finally like, moving around, he had to pretend not to watch Carter’s ass, or his shoulders, or the sweat dripping down the side of his neck, or the peek-a-boo flicker of his obliques through the arm holes of his tank top, or the little stripe of skin Kevin could see on the small of his back when his shirt rode up in that _damned_ down dog thing. And okay, Kevin still didn’t know where the fuck his sacral chakra was—was it like, a body part? Really he had no idea—but he _did_ know that watching Carter show off his flexibility and do all of the advanced like, arm balances and hand stands was kind of problematic, actually, because Kevin wanted to lick him _all over_ but he was in this fucking like, yoga class, with sweat dripping into his eyes, attempting to pretzel himself into some bullshit called _pigeon pose_.

“Or JVR pose,” he whispered to Carter, to distract himself from the pain, because his hips did not want to channel the spirit of the pigeon or what-the-fuck-ever the instructor was telling him to do.

Carter didn’t want to laugh—Kevin could see him trying not to—but he laughed anyway, muffled against his yoga mat with his shoulders shaking.

That was the best part of yoga class.

Better than Carter’s ass, even, which was how Kevin knew he _really_ had it bad.

-

There was a Dunkin right across the street from the studio—and sorry Pennsylvania but Wawa could eat his entire ass, Dunkin was the spot—and Kevin thought about asking if Carter wanted to go get a coffee or something after class. But he was looking a little—Kevin didn’t know, exactly—_twitchy_, maybe, again. Like he was a little nervous, not quite looking Kevin in the eye, inching towards the yoga studio’s door.

“See you tomorrow,” Kevin said, trying not to feel disappointed.

“Yeah, okay,” Carter answered. He was a little flushed, probably just from the steaminess of the yoga class—Kevin didn’t know why you had to do yoga at like, 85 degrees. Okay, he knew, he wasn’t a total fucking idiot: the warmth helped with flexibility and all that shit. Not that Carter needed help being more flexible. (Kevin needed help spending less time thinking about how flexible Carter was.)

But anyway, Carter was zipping up his coat and turning away, a little bit, and Kevin was trying to decide whether or not he was going to let himself stare at his ass in his track pants while he walked away—he totally was, since it would be like, an insult to the perfection of Carter’s ass if he didn’t—and then he kind of, stopped and turned back, like halfway out the door, totally blocking anyone else from getting into or out of the studio. “Same time next week?” he asked.

“Sure thing, buddy,” Kevin said.

Carter smiled, and turned back towards the street, and bumped into some grandma-looking old lady trying to come inside, and fell all over himself apologizing because he was a good Canadian boy, and Kevin’s stupid fucking heart did all kinds of things about it.

He gave Kevin an awkward little wave out on the sidewalk, and Kevin thought to himself, _fuck it, that’s your boy_, and dragged him in for a goodbye-buddy-hug, the same kind he’d give Patty or Beezer or G or anybody.

Except that Carter just—kept coming in hot, and then it was a real hug, with his nose in Carter’s un-gelled hair and their chests pressed together. “Thanks for coming,” Carter said, over his shoulder, and then he was stepping back and giving Kevin a second awkward goodbye wave, and Kevin was watching his ass walk itself down the cracked Center City sidewalk, and smiling, because he could still smell Carter’s like, organic lemony shampoo, and Jesus fucking Christ: his _ass_. He didn’t have a skate-all-day-thick hockey ass: he had a, a Carter Hart ass, high and tight and perfect on top of those long, long legs.

Kevin took his own ass to Dunkin—shut up, what AV didn’t know wasn’t going to hurt him—and got a Boston Kreme, because he felt like celebrating.

-

Because Kevin and Carter went to yoga now.

-

It wasn’t like, a thing. Carter still didn’t talk to him much, outside of that. Kevin tried not to be too bugged about it. Did his best to be chill about it, which was not a thing he’d ever been good at being; but it was okay. Carter could sit at the far end of the table for team dinners, Carter could get all squinty and annoyed about the Cahtah Haht thing—but they did hang out now. Verifiably. Once a week, like clockwork, or as much like clockwork as the batshit NHL schedule would allow for; and the trainers had started giving Kevin compliments on his improving flexibility, which was a nice side benefit to watching Carter sweat and work the muscles in his shoulders for an hour a week.

Kevin was also starting to get the sense that Carter wasn’t like. Oblivious.

He didn’t think about it much. Tried not to think about it at all, actually.

But he was pretty sure Carter had caught him, well, _looking_ a few times. Sue him, Kevin was only human.

Because their eyes would catch, and Carter would flush a little—because Kevin was looking at him or because the yoga studio was actually 100 degrees, it could go either way to be honest—but anyway Kevin would swear that Carter would kind of. Show off. Get his foot that inch higher in the air, get his back dipped or his abs flexed—

And he’d get this little. Smirk. Like he knew exactly what he looked like. Like he knew exactly where Kevin was looking.

It was.

Yeah.

It was sure a thing that was happening in Kevin’s life, for the first time, maybe ever: being thirsty as fuck for someone on a like. Sustained basis, where he also wanted to take them on dates and follow them around and meet their moms (well, that wasn’t the first time for that part, Kevin loved moms).

Basically like: thirsty _for_ _emotions._

And all the stupid shit from Mark Scheifele’s stupid worksheet.

So who was stupid now, Kevin didn’t really know.

-

He tried to explain this to Patty, once, which in retrospect was not the move. Patty rolled his eyes, didn’t bother looking up from his phone, and told him he was a fucking loser.

Which was pretty rich, coming from the dude who was dating known explosion of feelings _Travis Konecny_, but Kevin did know better than to call Patty out on it. He was having a good day: he’d gotten out of bed, skated, eaten lunch. So fine, if Patty wanted to be a—what was the word? There was definitely a word for it—hypo-something—_hypocritical!_ dipshit Kevin wasn’t going to call him on it.

“Get your boyfriend over here,” Kevin ordered him, instead. “I want to talk about some feelings shit.”

Patty turned bright red. “Text him yourself.”

“But he’ll ignore me.”

“That’s not my problem.”

“He only looks at his phone for your custom fucking ringtone.”

“Again: I don’t see why you think this is my problem.”

“Pat-ty,” Kevin moaned. He threw himself down on the couch. “Bud-dy. Why you gotta be like this, man. Have a fucking heart.”

“Tell him you’ll get sushi.”

Kevin heaved a sigh and pulled out his phone. _miss u bro ordering sushi come over ur boy misses u 2_

As predicted, TK did not answer until Patsy either got sick of listening to Kevin talk, or decided he wanted that sushi on his own schedule not the TK-ignoring-his-phone schedule, and texted him.

-

So Kevin was thirsty for Carter, and meeting Carter’s billet dad he always talked about, and he was at least kind of starting to think that maybe Carter wasn’t like totally _not_ into it. Even if Patty was totally silent on that point and TK just scrunched up his face and went _well I don’t really know Hayesie, we don’t talk about shit like that really_, _maybe ask Moose_? but that was the last goddamned thing Kevin was going to do about it.

Kevin would rather talk to Carter, actually, because he was pretty sure Carter wouldn’t deck him. Moose—Kevin just wasn’t trying to fuck with that level of concerned-dad energy.

“I’m talking to Carter today,” he announced to Patty, on his way out the door to yoga the Thursday after the Jackets game—he’d wanted to wait for a win, make sure Carter was in a good mood. Not that Carter let shit like, linger—he was too much of a professional for that—but still. Couldn’t hurt.

Kevin had his own mat and weird little mat-backpack-thing now, too, because Carter had offered to help him get stuff, and then gotten way into talking him through the pros and cons of every single yoga mat the studio was selling out in the lobby. It had been super-cute and the only time they’d ever hung out outside of team shit and yoga, even if it had been less “hanging out” and more “meeting like twenty minutes early for class one time.”

Carter had spent so long explaining the differences between the mats that they’d almost been late. Kevin would be late to yoga classes with Carter basically whenever—he was just saying.

“Hey, it’s a fresh hot Cahtah Haht,” he said, when Carter showed up. They had like, a spot now: middle of the room, right side, with Kevin between Carter and the wall. (Kevin could think of some other things he’d like to do sandwiched between Carter and a wall.)

Carter’s eyebrows did their I’m-Canadian-so-I’m-polite-but-I’m-definitely-displeased thing. Kevin really dug it. “Hayesie.”

“Sorry,” Kevin said. “Just nervous.”

“What?” Carter said, eyebrows sliding towards confusion. He had really expressive eyebrows, Kevin thought. Kevin could watch his eyebrows do things for like, a long time.

“I’ll tell ya later, bud.”

Carter still looked confused, but class was starting, so Kevin shushed him and spend the next hour like, trying to find his chill. He’d never been nervous about asking someone out before: probably because he’d never actually given a shit, before, he was realizing. The only thing that felt even slightly comparable was pitching that threesome to Johnny: he’d been standing in the noisy crush of people around the bar at Buff’s Pub, one arm around that girl’s hips and Johnny under his other, and his heart had been beating way too fast even through the haze of cheap beer, and then Johnny had grinned up at him and said, _sure, why the hell not, buddies, right?_

Kevin was currently stone cold sober, once again trying to get his right hip to cooperate with the fucking torture instrument known as pigeon pose. For like, his health.

So that was maturity, or something.

-

Kevin would not say he was more chilled-out after class. The whole final relaxation section had felt like lowkey torture, worse than the goddamned JVR pose: just lying on the floor on his mat, the fingers of his left land like, six inches away from Carter’s—close enough to touch, if he wanted to, and Jesus Christ did he want to slide his hand over that insignificant little distance, twist their fingers together and see how Carter’s palm felt against his.

Sweaty, probably.

But not in like, a bad way. Possibly in a good way: a used-my-body-well worked-up-a-sweat kind of way. The kind of way Kevin wanted them to sweat, only behind a closed door and involving his California king-sized bed. Or in his shower. Or Carter’s shower. Or a hotel room in Montreal or Los Angeles or Columbus fucking Ohio.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Carter said, when they’d all rolled back up to a seated position and bowed their heads and namaste-ed at the instructor.

“Hey, wait a sec, dude.”

Carter blinked at him, halfway through wiping off his mat. “Yeah?”

“I wanted to ask you something.” Kevin was still sitting cross-legged on the sticky plastic of his own mat, the one Carter basically picked out for him, because it would never even occur to Kevin to have that many opinions about a fucking yoga mat. But Carter cared about shit like that, noticed details. Kevin liked that about him.

“What?” he asked, eyebrows going flat as he kept wiping off his mat.

Kevin should not be this nervous about this. Kevin was a twenty-seven-year-old professional athlete. Kevin was a fucking catch, okay—he certainly had enough girls in his DMs telling him they wanted to suck his dick every time he scored a shortie.

“Do you want to go get a drink, or something?” he asked.

Carter didn’t look up from his mat. “Um,” he said, “I don’t really drink during the season,” as if Kevin didn’t know that.

“Or dinner, whatever.”

“I—” and oh shit, Kevin was about to get turned down right in the middle of a damned yoga studio, wasn’t he? But that was okay, he asked his buddies if they wanted to get dinner or drinks all the time—it didn’t have to mean anything. Just that he was probably going to have to put the whole Carter thing to bed, and not in a fun way. He was so sure he was getting turned down, that it took him a second to realize that Carter had actually said “Yeah, okay,” down to his yoga mat instead, folding up his wipe into a tidy little square.

“Dope.” Kevin kept his voice chill—chill-ish, anyway—even though his heart started thumping like he’d just finished one of AV’s tempo workouts.

“Just a drink, though. I have stuff to make for dinner at home.”

“I thought you didn’t drink.”

Carter flicked an eyebrow. “I can get a kombucha or a juice or whatever.”

-

There was a bar around the corner, hipster enough that their post-yoga set-up fit in okay. It was pretty full with an after-work kind of crowd, girls in leggings and crop tops from the SoulCycle around the other side of the block. They got a table, though, tucked away in the back; and a few looks as the host was leading them through the bar, but nobody said anything. Kevin was getting recognized more these days, and Carter was Carter, and the two of them together were going to get looks.

“How do you deal with it?” Carter asked, when they were sitting down.

“Deal with what?”

“Like, getting recognized and stuff.” He was looking down at the drink menu, fidgeting one thumb against the top corner. “It’s still kinda weird for me. I mean, this is a pretty big market—like bigger than I thought it would be.”

“Dunno, dude.” Kevin shrugged and dropped his elbows on the table. This joint was not that classy. “In New York I was pretty like, insignificant, you know? Like my apartment was around the corner from Beyoncé and Jay-Z. Nobody gives a shit about a Rangers player when you’re standing next to Jay-Z. And in Dorchester everybody knows everybody anyway, so it’s not like people know me ‘cause of hockey, it’s just ‘cause I’m Jimmy’s little brother or I went to school with their cousin or we played rec league baseball or whatever.”

“I guess.” Carter stopped fidgeting with his menu long enough to order a lemon-ginger kombucha. Was that shit actually everywhere, and Kevin had never noticed it before? Anyway Kevin was being adventurous, so he got the same thing, enjoying the weird look Carter sent him from the other side of the table.

“What?”

“Do you actually like kombucha?”

“Never had it, bud. Trying some new shit, or whatever. New season new me.”

“Oh.” Carter folded his hands away under the table. It was awkward, kind of; like they’d never really tried to talk, before, other than that one lunch at the apartment. It was also a new thing for Kevin, not knowing what to say: like if this was purely buddies shit he’d start talking about practice, or gossip from around the league—but he didn’t _want_ it to be just buddies shit. He wanted to like, _know_ things about Carter.

“What’s your favorite weird health food?” he asked, because he’d wondered about it.

Carter wrinkled his eyebrows. “I don’t eat that much weird health food. I eat like, normal stuff.”

“Like kombucha.”

“Kombucha’s not weird. It’s really good for you.”

“Shut up,” Kevin said. “It’s weird.”

“You haven’t even tried it yet.”

The server appeared, right on time, with two pint glasses of—whatever the fuck kombucha was. Kevin told him to stay while he tried it. Took a sip, thought about it: it was like, fizzy, kind of tasted like gingery tea only sourer—and nah.

“Kombucha is not the move,” Kevin announced. “I’ll take whatever IPA you’ve got on tap.” He nudged his glass over towards Carter’s side of the table. “Hey, free kombucha to a good home.”

“I don’t want to drink your backwash.”

“Suit yourself, bro.” Kevin shrugged. “Hey, I tried it, anyway. Doing some new shit this year. Yoga. Kombucha. Philadelphia.” Dudes, maybe. Or like, one dude, possibly, if he was into it.

“Anywhere’s better than Winnipeg.” Carter did the thing with his eyebrows that expressed distaste. “No matter what Patty says.”

“Prairie boy rivalry shit?” Kevin asked, grinning. He tipped back in his chair, stretched his legs into Carter’s side of the table without thinking about it. “I hate to break it to you but Edmonton isn’t any better, Hartsy.”

“It so is!” And then Carter was telling him all the eight hundred different ways Alberta was better than Manitoba, prairie boy pride fully on the line. Or like, not, because Carter was rhapsodizing about the Canadian Rockies, which were in Alberta apparently—who the fuck knew? Certainly not Kevin.

So they were low-key arguing about Canadian cities Kevin didn’t give a shit about; somehow transitioned into fighting about the Eagles versus the Pats—which wasn’t even a fight, Carter didn’t know shit but was really digging his heels in on the whole _Tom Brady is not the greatest QB of all time_ thing, as if Carson Wentz had ever won a playoff game in his entire life; fighting about basketball; finding some agreement over baseball, since Carter had gone all-in on the Philadelphia sports train and Bryce Harper was Kevin’s boy.

“Gonna get into any new sports?” Carter asked him. He was on his third kombucha by then and Kevin had switched to water, since they had praccie in the morning and he was actually a responsible guy these days, at least most of the time. “For your like, trying new stuff situation.”

“Dunno.” Kevin shrugged. “Just like, trying the dating thing, I guess. You know. Meeting people.”

Carter’s eyebrows flattened out at he looked down at his kombucha. “Yeah, I guess.”

Shit. Kevin had been trying to—what did you call it—like the little scooter things—_segue_ into actually asking Carter out, like not just a buddies-grabbing-a-drink way but an official I-would-like-to-suck-on-your-tongue way. Carter’s displeased eyebrows were not the vibe he had been hoping to inspire, but Kevin wanted to like—get this done. He’d set this goal for himself and Kevin was nothing if not goal-directed. “So like. We never did compare notes about first date spots.”

“Bowling,” said Carter.

“…Really,” said Kevin.

Carter shrugged and nodded. “Yeah. It’s fun. And there’s like, something to do. I do better when we’re doing something, you know, physical. I suck at going on dates where you just sit there and have to like—look at each other.” He was blushing for no reason.

“So basically like what we’re doing right now.”

“This isn’t our first date,” Carter said. Then his eyebrows did a thing, and he blushed. “I mean. Like. You know.”

“Do I?” Kevin asked him. His heart was thumping again. “This could be a date.”

“No, it couldn’t.” Carter hit him with the scornful eyebrow.

“Why?”

“You know why, Hayesie. Stop joking about it.”

“What am I joking about?”

Carter fidgeted with his glass of kombucha. “You saw me. Before. On a date. And I know Patty said you’re being cool about it or whatever, but you don’t need to like—make it into a joke.”

“I’m not joking.”

“You joke about everything.”

“Not _everything_,” Kevin said. Then in the spirit of full disclosure he added, “Okay, yeah, most things. But like. To be clear. I would like to ask you to go on a date with me. Not like, ambiguous yoga. Or whatever the hell this is.”

“A date,” Carter said, blinking at him and pronouncing the word like he wasn’t sure what it meant, even though they’d literally just been talking about it. “Hayesie, like, I do want to be clear about whether you mean a bro-date.”

“What’s a bro-date?”

“Like. Dinner with your buddies.”

Kevin did love to get dinner with his buddies. “Hey, if we’re dating does that mean you have to have dinner with me? Because dude, I am not going to lie, I’m pretty sick of Patty’s dumb ass sitting on the couch ordering takeout and playing Fortnite for the twenty-fifth day in a fuckin’ row.”

Carter blinked again. Kevin wasn’t quite sure what he was doing with his eyebrows—they were either neutral, or verging on slight confusion, which was par for the course, to be honest. “I don’t play Fortnite,” was what he decided to go with.

“Do you golf?”

“Duh.”

“How often do you fish?” Kevin asked him. This was important.

“Like, occasionally? If I’m around someone who super wants to go?” The eyebrow had transitioned to full confusion or full judgment. Kevin needed to get better at interpreting Carter Hart’s eyebrow language, maybe.

Meanwhile, Kevin was grinning, because he’d never bothered to learn how to be anything other than an open book. “And do you get dinner, with people who aren’t boring weird dudes from the internet? Who you can’t even stand to look at in the face for an hour?”

Carter took a swig from his glass of kombucha. He hadn’t said no to anything, so Kevin felt less creepy than he usually did as he watched the lines Carter’s throat made as he swallowed.

He set his empty glass back down on the table, looking at it as he nudged it back into the precise center of his coaster. “This is a terrible idea,” he said.

But not like he was about to say no, and he didn’t.

-

To absolutely no one’s surprise, Patso was on the couch playing—it wasn’t Fortnite, the graphics were different—but anyway, he was sitting on the couch playing a video game and mumble-yelling at TK and Beezer over his headset. He was too busy killing things—Nazis? possibly zombie Nazis?—to do more than roll his eyes when Kevin told him hello.

“Have you ordered your delivery yet, asshole?” Kevin asked him.

Patty shook his head, not taking his eyes off the TV. “I’m feeling Thai.” Pause. “No, Teeks, Hayesie just got home. He’s getting dinner,” he said, freeing one eyeball from staring down Nazis to make it clear that he now _expected_ Kevin to order him dinner, so he wouldn’t have to pause his game for like, 30 seconds to open GrubHub on his phone.

But literally whatever. Kevin knew his order and Kevin was in a good mood. “I have someone to get dinner with now, you dickhead. Don’t expect this dinner-ordering service to last.”

Patty shrugged one shoulder. “Great, does that mean you’ll stop bothering me,” he said, like a statement. Another pause. “No, Bee, I was talking to Hayesie.”

Kevin really did not want to be the kind of dude who was like, _kids these days with their video games and their tiny telephones_—but yeah.

Fuckin’ kids these days, man.

Not like, all kids. Carter was fine. (More than fine.)

Just the particular baby NHL nerd that Kevin had living in his nicest spare bedroom.

“Patso, you’re lucky your boyfriend thinks blowing shit up on the Xbox is the same as foreplay,” Kevin told the back of his head. He ducked down the hallway before Patty could do more than make a muffled noise of rage. Pats would calm down once Kevin had his Thai order to hold hostage.

-

So, Kevin and Carter went to dinner on their next roadie. They swung through NY to play the Isles, which worked—Kevin knew his way around New York’s dinner scene, and the Rangers were out in the West somewhere so none of his boys were around to chill.

The fact that it was on the road made it, whatever, lower stakes. Even socially inept losers like Beezer had to leave their hotel rooms to get food on roadies, at least sometimes; and it wasn’t weird for guys to split off into various groups, depending on who wanted sushi vs. steak vs. whatever else.

They were doing a small group. Of two. To like, a nice restaurant, with candles on the tables, where their gameday suits were going to fit in—an old-school, upscale Italian place a few blocks down from Kevin’s old apartment. He didn’t know if Carter was a fancy dinner kind of guy or not, but he figured, why not? Shoot your shot or whatever, and it wasn’t like he was ever taking TK and Patty anywhere that used white tablecloths.

Carter looked either smug, or vaguely nervous. Kevin wasn’t quite sure; wasn’t quite sure how to act, himself, because this both was and wasn’t dinner with a buddy. If he’d been taking a girl out, he would have put his hand on her lower back, automatic, to help guide her to their table; but Kevin also wouldn’t have been nervous about it, because he wouldn’t have actually given a shit.

Huh. Maybe he should have been nicer to Johnny in college, or Brady and Jimmy in their apartment down the street, fussing with their hair and worrying about whether a girl was going to like them back. Or at least whether she was going to put out.

“So,” Carter said. He was fidgeting with the corner of his menu. “Is this place like, a front for the mob?”

Kevin snorted out a laugh. “Don’t care, Hartsy. They got the best cannoli in the city. And don’t worry, I called ahead so they know you don’t fuck with dairy.”

“Thanks.” Carter flashed him a quick, nervous little smile. “So, uh. Did you ever go to that place that was on TV? Cake Boss or whatever?”

“That’s in Jersey, dude.”

“Yeah, but like, close?”

“Pro tip,” Kevin told him, grinning, “don’t go to Jersey unless you gotta play the Devs. Or go to practice, I guess, but South Jersey is different.”

“Whatever.” Carter’s eyebrow twitched. “It’s like, right there.”

“A whole entire world away.” This poor fucking sheltered Canadian dumbass, seriously.

“I always think I’m gonna go, when we’re here,” Carter said, apparently back on Cake Boss. “But then I never make it.”

“Why the fuck would you want to go to New Jersey to eat like, cream puffs? When you don’t even eat dairy?”

“Shut up, I love cooking shows,” he said, all defensive like Kevin had insulted his home-ice save percentage. “I think it would be cool, that’s all.”

If anyone had ever told Kevin, this time last year, that he’d be on a date with his team’s franchise goalie; who was a dude and not like, the first ever female NHL player; and that he’d be lowkey enjoying the play-by-play of his favorite shit on the Food Network—Kevin would abso-fucking-lutely not have believed it.

But here he was. Getting into Carter’s recap of a show that seemed to feature small children who were better at baking than either of them would ever be. Arguing about what would be the weirdest combination of shit to put in the boxes for Chopped. It was extremely buddies, in a bizarro-goalie sideways world where the Food Network was like, the shit; but every once in a while Kevin would catch himself looking at Carter’s eyes, or his cheekbones, or the way his shoulders moved under the fabric of his suit, and maybe Carter would catch _him_—because he’d blush a little, and flick his eyes down at his plate or at his glass of sparkling water; but then he’d lick his lips, and look at Kevin from under his dark eyelashes, and like—hello! It was the same shit from yoga, where Carter would maybe notice him looking, and like, dial it up?

The good news was that Kevin’s lap was under a tablecloth this time, instead of out in public in a fucking yoga studio.

The better news was that—yeah. That look that Carter was sending him over the table was not the look of someone who was _not_ down to bone. It was just _hot_, actually, in a way that Kevin couldn’t quite reconcile with the Flyers’ sheltered little boy genius goalie.

But like. He wanted to reconcile that shit.

He wanted to _reconcile_ that shit.

Kevin wasn’t quite sure what reconciling actually meant. But if there was any possible way that it involved Carter’s dick, or Carter’s stupidly pink mouth wrapped around _Kevin’s_ dick—he would like the record to show that he was extremely, _extremely_ down.

Kevin needed to stop staring at Carter’s mouth. He was talking before he’d thought it all the way through, which was not unusual. “So like—the online dating thing. How was that going? Which one were you using?”

Carter was definitely blushing now, staring down at his empty plate. He seemed to be thinking about what he was going to say. Finally settled on, “I tried a couple. Mostly Tinder and, uh, Grindr. Sometimes.”

“That’s the sex one, right?” Kevin asked, because his brain was going, _holy shit, that’s the sex one!!_ and he had never claimed to like, be chill.

There was another long pause. Carter’s eyebrows were drawing together over his nose. And then he told his plate, in his media-trained good-Canadian-boy voice, “I like, have a pretty high sex drive, you know? I don’t want it to become a distraction during the season, so it’s better if I, I dunno, stay on top of it. I was maybe trying to meet people, too. But, yeah.”

Kevin didn’t spit a mouthful of water onto his second-favorite tie, but it was a close thing. The idea of Carter—Kevin didn’t know where his mind was going, honestly. It seemed to be spiraling into a lot of different directions, all at once, which wasn’t like, unusual, but this was—yeah. Holy shit.

Carter Hart didn’t just use a dating app; Carter Hart got dick off Grindr. Pretty boy, buttoned-up, no-alcohol no-dairy Carter Hart was out there like—he actually couldn’t think about it. Because it involved Carter Hart having, having, _sex_ with faceless dudes who, who were maybe not like, good guys, and there were a lot of different things in there that he couldn’t think about. The sex, or the faceless dudes—well, he’d seen one of them, hadn’t he? In that brewery? But regardless Kevin wanted to give every single one of them a black eye—well, maybe get TK to give them all black eyes, Kevin wasn’t really a fighter—but yeah okay, maybe this time Kevin could do the punching himself.

Carter, who stayed on top of dudes from the Internet like it was a maintenance workout, Jesus _fucking_ Christ, was looking at him from across the table with concerned eyes. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Kevin managed, hacking the last swallow of water out of his trachea. “Isn’t that like, kind of—dangerous? Like, you don’t know who these dudes are. They could be anyone.”

He shrugged. “I mean, I know it’s not ideal. But what else am I gonna do?”

“Me. You could do—me.”

Carter curled an eyebrow. He looked confused. “You’d be like—into that. Really.”

“Sure would, bud. Buying you dinner and everything.”

“That’s—” He coughed. Took a sip of water. “I. Wow. Really. Uh.” He was blushing harder. “I don’t really, uh. Know what to say.”

“I think the options are _yes_, or _no_, or maybe _I need to think about it_.”

“I’ve thought about it,” Carter told his water glass.

Kevin loosened his tie around his neck. “Have you.”

Carter looked up at him through his eyelashes. Licked his lips. And: shit. Holy shit. “Yeah.”

This was maybe the most awkward prelude to a hookup Kevin had ever had in his entire life: totally sober, talking about it with like, words. Possibly it was some real adult shit; possibly it was some _Carter Hart was awkward_ shit. Kevin didn’t know; he was usually drunk, and usually the last thing he wanted to do was to like, _talk_ about having sex with whatever girl he was about to have sex with. Because who knew: it turned out that Kevin did not like to have sex with women, so he didn’t like to talk about it, or think about it, much less actually do it.

He was totally able to think about having sex with Carter. Possibly he was unable to think about anything _other_ than having sex with Carter, for the rest of his life.

“Do you want to, uh, go,” Kevin asked him. His voice felt scratchy and his pants were at least a size too small.

“You didn’t get your cannoli,” Carter pointed out.

“I’d rather—” Kevin stopped himself before he could say something _really_ fucking embarrassing, like _I’d rather have _your_ cannoli_. “We can order dessert at the hotel,” he said instead.

“I haven’t said yes yet.” Carter had that little smirk again, though: the one from yoga, the one he shot the media after a really good win, the _I know I’m good and I know you know it, too_ look.

“Are you. Uh. Going to.”

Carter shrugged one shoulder. He always wore the exact same plaid suit. It looked good on him, no matter how much shit the other guys gave him about his boring clothes. Kevin may have even joined in a time or two, but it turned out that actually Kevin wanted him to wear the same suit forever, or as long as he wanted to, or as long as it kept looking like that when the fabric slid over his shoulders. “Maybe,” he said, white teeth denting the curve of his bottom lip, turquoise eyes transparent under his dark lashes. “I really have thought about it. Patty told me—” He stopped. “Well. That like. It could maybe be a thing. And so I’ve thought about it. A _lot_.”

Jesus Christ, Kevin was going to cream his pants in this extremely classy restaurant. Because there was Carter, sitting on the other side of the table, looking at him with heated-up eyes and teeth in his lip and a blush along the tops of his cheeks: telling Kevin he’d thought about the two of them fucking.

“Check, please,” he managed to tell the server.

-

Carter was quiet on the cab ride back to the hotel, long legs crossed at the knee, watching the city lights out the window. Kevin managed to keep up a stream of consciousness conversation about living in New York with the cab driver; but he didn’t ever manage to stop looking at Carter, at the white column of his throat or the curl of hair that kept falling over his forehead.

They didn’t run into any of the guys in the lobby or the elevator or the hallway on the eighteenth floor, where they were all staying. That was some miraculous shit, right there, like the universe was conspiring to keep their nosy fucking teammates in their rooms or in the club or wherever the hell they were—Kevin did not give one single fuck as long as it wasn’t here.

“So,” he said, and had to swallow. His mouth was dry, like his post-game hydration routine had gotten thrown off.

Carter bunked with Phil on the road. Their room was only a few doors away from the elevator; Kevin’s single was farther down the hallway. They hovered in the empty space of the hall. Kevin was ready for TK or Jake or G or one of the other noted busybodies of the team to come out of the woodwork at any second.

“Yes,” said Carter. “I’m saying—yes.”

“Dope,” said Kevin. He winced. “I mean—cool. Or like, I’m glad, or—shit. I’ve thought about it. Too. A few times. Or like, all the time.”

“Hope I live up to it.”

“I don’t think you need to worry about that.” Kevin was unlocking his door, ushering Carter inside, touching the small of his back because yeah, he could do that now, probably.

“I don’t usually get any complaints.”

“Who the fuck,” Kevin asked, “would be dumb enough to complain about fucking _you_. Jesus Christ, Hartsy. Have you seen you. Have you seen your _abs_.”

“Yeah.” Carter was definitely smirking now, as he slid his suit jacket off his shoulders, hung it over the back of a chair. “All that health food, eh?”

It hit Kevin, all of a sudden, that they were about to—do this. That _he_ was about to do this. Sail into the great unknown of like, non-theoretical gayness: that he was going to touch Carter, and Carter was going to touch him. There was his plaid suit jacket, hanging off the desk chair of Kevin’s hotel room; Carter’s fingers, going to the top button of his blue shirt, unbuttoning one button and then stopping. He was frowning, looking across the room at Kevin, and Kevin realized that he was kind of—frozen, caught out of position.

Carter didn’t ask if he was okay. His eyebrow flattened out, like he was thinking, and then he picked up the TV remote and threw it at Kevin’s chest. “Want to watch some Food Network or something?”

Kevin caught the remote. Heard himself laugh; it felt a little bit like all of this was happening to someone else. “Yeah, okay, buddy.”

So they got onto the massive hotel bed, both still wearing suit pants and button-downs, and they watched an episode of Chopped. Kevin couldn’t help keeping up a running play-by-play; Carter had opinions about one guy’s use of fiddlehead ferns.

It was a little awkward, until suddenly it wasn’t: Carter was laughing at Kevin’s exasperation over the idea that anyone would ever want to eat a fucking _fern_, and Kevin was maybe playing it up a little bit, because fuck it—he liked to make people laugh anyway, and Carter was so serious, usually; hearing the startled sound of his laughter, the way his head was thrown back and the color of his hair against the dark wood of the hotel headboard—

It was like the moment the puck dropped for a big game. Nerves, anticipation, yeah, okay, maybe fear; but then that circle of vulcanized rubber hit the ice, and all of it went away.

Kevin put his fingers along Carter’s jawline. It wasn’t quite smooth, at this time of night. Carter was still laughing, a little, when Kevin pulled him in.

“Hi,” he said, because he was weird.

Wasn’t stopping Kevin, though. Kissing him both was and wasn’t like kissing a woman: his lips were rougher, his jaw was sharper, he was growing that extremely bad Movember moustache; but Kevin had kissed plenty of people so it wasn’t like he was having some totally out-of-body experience, either. Carter had lips; Carter had a tongue; Carter made a pleased little humming noise when Kevin licked into his mouth.

“I didn’t think you’d be this good at kissing,” Carter said, a few minutes later. His cheeks were flushed and his hair was all fucked-up from where Kevin had been running a hand through it. Kevin couldn’t stop staring at his lips.

“Rude,” he answered. Carter was lucky he looked the way he looked, and kissed the way he kissed, and felt the way he felt on top of Kevin’s body: one long, hard line from his shoulders to his knees. Absolutely nothing like a woman.

“I mean, you’re all—bro-y.”

“Bros can be good kissers.”

“I just said you were,” Carter pointed out, like it was totally normal to have a like, sidebar convo about kissing in the middle of a make-out session. Maybe it was for Carter—he was fucking strange. In like, a good way, where Kevin felt like he was learning a lot of shit he wouldn’t have known about otherwise. Like that you could eat ferns, and how to do pigeon pose, and that he, Kevin Patrick Hayes, was definitely, 100%, gay.

Well, Kevin also had to record an assist for goddamned Mark Scheifele and his stupid little worksheet on that one.

“Maybe we could talk less,” Kevin offered, because he did not want to be thinking about Scheif right now, “and kiss more?”

Carter’s eyebrow scrunched down, like he was sincerely thinking about it. “Do you not like it when I talk?”

“I like it when we’re making out.”

“I never thought you’d be the quiet one,” Carter said, which meant he was still talking instead of making out with Kevin. That was like, kind of a bummer, since it turned out Kevin had been waiting twenty-seven years and however many months to get in bed with someone he really, truly, wholeheartedly, wanted to fuck.

Kevin figured he deserved to grab Carter’s ass about it. Carter made a surprised noise, and it pulled something deeper out of Kevin’s chest when it brought their hips all the way together. Because—yeah. There was Carter’s dick. When he’d thought about it like, critically (which was rare), Kevin had been, maybe, a little worried that he’d—freak out at this point. Like, yes, Carter had a mouth made for sucking dick and a face like an angel and a body that was pretty fucking unreal, even on the professional athlete scale; and he acted like such a good kid—because he _was_ such a good kid—and there was absolutely some primal cave-man part of Kevin’s brain that wanted to, sincerely, _fuck him up_—

But yeah. Kevin was not freaking out.

Kevin was grabbing Carter’s shoulders and throwing him over onto his back, holding his jaw and letting Carter suck on his tongue. Kevin was not _quite_ ripping Carter’s shirt open. Kevin was listening to known good boy Carter Hart whisper in his ear, in exactingly explicit detail, exactly how he liked to be touched—where, when, how tight—and god help him, Kevin had always been coachable, even if he never would have thought he’d be getting coached through the finer points of giving another man a hand job.

He was probably doing okay, though, because Carter’s instructions had trailed off into little gasping noises into the side of his neck; then he went still and taut all over, and came.

Carter wanted to be kissed afterward, all soft and like, _accommodating_, his arms wrapped around Kevin’s neck and one leg over his hips. Kevin wanted to do whatever the fuck Carter wanted him to do: kiss him, marry him, let him win at Mario Kart or make him taste unpronounceable fermented health beverages, take the train out to fucking Hoboken, New Jersey, to eat pastries—

Or, as it turned out, let him give Kevin a blow job. “I like it,” he said into Kevin’s ear. “Do you want me to?”

“Who the fuck,” Kevin asked him, “would say no to that?”

“Open communication is sexy,” Carter said, like he’d read it on the internet somewhere.

“_You’re_ sexy,” Kevin told him.

Carter liked that. Hit him with the under-the-eyelashes look, which was probably his sex look. His lips were already wet. “You can fuck my face,” he said, with the same mouth that gave post-game interviews and talked about his commitment to like, children’s charities. Then he said, “I’d like it if you pulled my hair,” and while he did, in fact, suck dick like a fucking porn star, the fact that Kevin came in about ninety seconds flat was due less to the five-star clinic in dick-sucking, and more to the fact that _Carter Hart_ had just told him to pull his hair and fuck his face.

“Jesus _fucking_ Christ,” Kevin gasped, when he was capable of speech again. And like, Kevin knew himself: it took a lot to get him to shut up. But there was nothing about Carter, cheeks hollowed out, letting Kevin in fact fuck his face, that was not _a lot_.

“I like to be good at things,” Carter said, with the exact same little smirk he got on his face when he knew he’d played a lights-out game.

“You are _really_ good at...things.”

“Mm,” said Carter. He stretched upwards, still kneeling with his legs on either side of Kevin’s thighs, and ruffled a hand through his hair. Kevin touched his abs, because they were right there, and because he liked the way his hands looked on Carter’s skin.

“I should send Mark Scheifele a thank you note,” Kevin said, without thinking.

Carter’s eyebrows drew down in confusion. “What?”

Kevin should get better at thinking before he spoke. “I wouldn’t be here without Scheif,” he said, which was not actually progress in terms of thinking before he spoke.

“_What_?”

“Not like _that_, Jesus. Fuck. No.”

“Thank god.” Carter flopped down next to him. Their heads were on the same pillow. Their noses were almost touching. Kevin felt—gooey, in a way that he’d never felt after a hookup before; like he wanted to push the hair off Carter’s forehead, like he wanted to kiss the tip of his nose. Do all of the things he’d done before, because you were supposed to; but that he’d never really _felt_. “Er. Isn’t he like, really into Jesus? There’s nothing wrong with that,” he added, automatic. “I just wouldn’t, like. Have thought Mark Scheifele would be anyone’s like, gay awakening.” He paused. “Is he like—your type,” he asked, with his eyebrows flattening out.

Kevin kissed one, because why the fuck shouldn’t he. “No,” he said. “Turns out my type is goalies from Edmonton.”

Carter curled his lip, just barely. “I’m definitely hotter than Scheifele. And I’m really from Sherwood Park, not the city.”

“You sure are, babe.” God, was Kevin going to have to learn about places in and around _Edmonton_? God, had Kevin just called Carter _babe_, in a distinctly not-bros not-buddies context where they were both fully naked in a not-locker-room setting?

Carter didn’t look like he minded, though. “You’re definitely my type,” he said. “Jeez. The first time I saw you I was just like, uh-oh. That’s why I was kind of, you know. A little standoffish or whatever.”

It was Kevin’s turn to smirk. “Yeah?”

Carter nodded. Leaned his head forward until his lips were touching Kevin’s ear, and told him all the ways that Kevin was exactly, _exactly_ his type, and then neither of them was talking for a while after that.

-

Kevin’s mom had told him a couple times: _Kevin, I don’t understand why you don’t have a girlfriend. You’d be such a good boyfriend_, and Kevin had always waved her off like _yeah sure ma, maybe when I meet the right girl_.

Turned out there was a critical flaw in that premise. Not with the part about Kevin being a good boyfriend: it turned out that Kevin was a really fucking awesome boyfriend, if he did say so himself. Kevin was thoughtful; Kevin liked making Carter laugh; and it turned out that Kevin was pretty good at helping Carter with real basic life shit he should definitely know by the age of twenty-one, like how to turn off his fire alarm or how to brew his own pot of coffee. Kevin was also good at letting Carter keep dragging him to yoga, and spending more time in Whole Foods reading nutritional labels than he’d ever thought possible, and also, following eye-poppingly explicit instructions for how Carter liked to be held down and fucked up.

Kevin did not develop a taste for kombucha, because that shit was nasty as hell, no matter how many different flavors Carter bought for him to try.

But Kevin’s mom was right about Kevin being the best boyfriend ever. It just turned out that he needed to find the right not-girl.

And maybe he was going to send stupid Mark Scheifele that thank-you note, after all.

**Author's Note:**

> I am on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/canarynary) if you would like to yell about the Flyers.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] The Christian Foundations of Healthy Spirituality: A Worksheet for Men](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24878866) by [Annapods](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Annapods/pseuds/Annapods)
  * [[Podfic] The Christian Foundations of Healthy Spirituality: A Worksheet for Men](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24880537) by [ofjustimagine](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ofjustimagine/pseuds/ofjustimagine)


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